Long before LLMs, programmers regularly and massively underestimated how hard it is to automate other people’s work. Knowledge workers often think carpenters just bang nails into wood, while blue collar workers think knowledge work as sitting in front of a screen copying values from Excel on the left into a form on the right while sipping a latte.
Only like 2.5 years ago, I thought programming would be one of the last knowledge worker jobs to be significantly affected by LLMs, not one of the first. I think AI models will continue to be very impactful. But for quite a while, they may mostly turn knowledge work into a last mile problem rather than eliminating it.
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write binary/assembler code
Now:
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write C++/Rust code
Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?
To put in another way, we have been building abstractions to make things easier for us to code. With coding agents you don't even code in the first place. It almost feels like a logical fallacy to compare the two